Drop Dead, My Lovely by Ellis Weiner

From Ellis Weiner, contributor to legendary humor publications National Lampoon and Spy as well as the New York Times, The New Yorker, and many more, comes a debut novel that's drop dead funny...

For Pete Ingalls, being a P.I. means walking the streets, wearing a fedora, and solving crimes. So, far he's got the first two of those down. Not bad for a mild-mannered bookstore clerk who got hit in the head with a ruthless stack of hardcovers, only to wake up in a daze of outdated wisecracks, tough talk, and no recollection of his former life.

Now, with a hard-boiled attitude and a thoroughly scrambled brain, Ingalls decides to open his own detective agency. He hires a mouthy dame as his secretary and the damsels in distress start showing up. Soon Pete's tracking down all sorts of shadowy characters-not to mention a real live dead body-with nothing to go on but a healthy dose of delusion behind his squinting eyes. And he's making a holy mess of everything...

Ellis Weiner was an original columnist for SpyMagazine and an editor of National Lampoonfrom 1976-1978. He contributed to all the best group satire projects of the day, including Not the New York Timesand Off the Wall Street Journal. He has published numerous humor pieces in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and the New York Times Magazine, among others.